


within us, multitudes

by cygnes



Category: Honeymoon (2014)
Genre: Body Horror, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 21:52:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3224738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/cygnes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A use is found for Paul after all. (An alternate ending for the movie that's arguably more horrifying than the actual ending.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	within us, multitudes

**Author's Note:**

> Why limit gross body horror to cis ladies, right? I figure alien parasitic offspring can be incubated just as effectively in the abdominal cavity more generally as opposed to only the uterus. I know the beginning is a little ambiguous, but it's meant to start just before the scene where Paul goes into the woods with a shotgun. 
> 
> Originally posted [here](http://manzanas-amargas.tumblr.com/post/108978173065/fic-within-us-multitudes) on tumblr.
> 
> Warning for alien abduction, violation of bodily autonomy, loss of self/memory/being subsumed by a non-human collective consciousness, people incubating parasitic alien young inside them, rapid decay of living human bodies.

Paul is awake when the light comes. He’s not an especially brave man, but he is in love, and he will protect his wife if he can. This time. As he did not before. He follows it from window to window—or does it follow him? The light is very bright and he has time to think that it moves too smoothly for any human hand to be guiding it.

Paul opens the door out into the darkness and steps through.

The sky is greying with dawn when he comes back to himself. He is cold. The chill has had hours to settle on his bare skin.

When he gets back to the house, Bea is standing on the porch.

"Where are your clothes?" she calls down. He looks up and shakes his head. He doesn’t know. "Come inside." She meets him halfway up the stairs to the porch and drapes a blanket over his shoulders. Her eyes are sad. "I wanted to protect you."

There are raw red stinging marks on his lower abdomen, small and circular and evenly spaced. With them come a chorus of whispers. His body feels ill-fitting and crowded. His mind is out of sync. On the couch, Bea cradles his head against her chest. Paul’s head is filled with static but love makes his eyes drip salt on her skin.

"You should start writing," she whispers, "before you forget."

"Am I forgetting?" he says. His voice is thick with emotion or possibly mucus.

"You will," she says. "Yes."

Paul takes a shower and he says he feels fine, because it seems like something he should say. Bea has found a legal pad and a ballpoint pen for him somewhere. They sit across from each other and write for a half hour. It’s hard work to remain in the same world.

Here is what Paul writes:

_My name is Paul._  
 _My wife is Bea._  
 _We are sick._  
 _We are forgetting._  
 _Here are the important things to keep in mind:_  
 _Grind the coffee beans before you put them in the coffee maker._  
 _Batter the French toast before you put it on the griddle._  
 _Be honest with Bea._

Later, he adds:

_We are changing and it is not for the better._

But he crosses that line out, and does not copy it over when he copies out the rest of it again (and again and again). The voices of the many swell and ebb within him, drowning out coherent thought in fits and starts.

"My name is Bea," the red-haired woman says. The waves come crashing over them both. The recitation keeps them moored. "My husband is Paul."

"My name is Paul," he says. "My wife is Bea." She smiles at him. Bea smiles at Paul.

"Do you want to go out on the lake?" Bea says. "It’s still our honeymoon." But it isn’t. A honeymoon would be just for the two of them, and now they are joined by a hundred (or a thousand or a million) silent murmurs reminding them of their greater purpose.

"I don’t want to have to kill any frogs," Paul says.

"We don’t have to fish," she says. "We could go swimming." She frowns. "No, because it’s too—"

"—cold," he agrees. This they both remember. For the moment.

They go down to the boathouse but they don’t get into the canoe or the little motorboat. Bea opens the door and they look out over the water. They sit quietly, holding hands and saying nothing that the tender contact of skin against skin can’t say on its own.

Paul finds himself tipping over as he tries to stand, blindsided by the shock of movement somewhere deep inside his body. Something small, but stronger than the tissues surrounding it. Bea catches his arm and keeps him from falling.

"I did say I wasn’t ready for a baby," he says, smiling wanly, and Bea smiles back.

"I don’t think that’s the right word for it," she says.

The unnumbered voices are clearer at night, singing to them of their grand shared destiny. The sacrifice that will be made of them to bring forth generations, and how grateful their killers are for the use of their small soft warm bodies. How sorry that they are too weak to survive, or else they would be thanked. They will live on, they are told, in the lives they will bear—the lives what will rip them apart from the inside, unseeing and unfeeling, fed on what is leeched from their nerves and muscle and marrow.

They wake together, side by side, at the same time.

"We don’t matter to them," he says to the red-haired woman.

"We?" she says. "Them?"

"My name is Paul," he says. "My wife is—"

"My name is Bea," she cuts in. Recognition, or simple desperation. "My husband is Paul." Bea and Paul wrap themselves around each other, two trees planted too close in the same earth.

They shower together and not because of lust. They have so little energy; the lives inside them take so much and give nothing back. They shower together because not touching makes the prison of a failing body that much harder to bear. The hot water drowns everything out. He closes his eyes for what seems like a long time, and when he opens them, he doesn’t know the woman in his arms.

"Who are you?" he murmurs against her neck.

"I’m your wife."

"How do you know that?"

"How do you not know that?"

He does know. He doesn’t know her name, or his, but he knows the love and the sorrow coursing through him as strong as the pain.

"You’re slipping away so fast," she says, cupping his face in her hands. The water is cooling against his back. "So much faster than me."

"I guess I was always a quick study." He doesn’t know what it means, but it makes her laugh. He loves the sound. It’s the first time he’s hearing it; he’s heard it a thousand times before.

"My name is Bea," she says. "My husband is Paul."

"My name is…" He has to think about it. "Paul." He looks down at her and the rest rushes in, easy. "My wife is Bea." He turns off the taps and the room is full of steam and dripping. "Be honest with Bea," he says to himself.

"What?"

"I have to be honest with you," Paul says. "I made myself remember that." Bea smiles. Her skin is cracking, flaking. He doesn’t have to wipe the condensation off the mirror to know his will be the same. "Bea, the honest truth: I’m fucking terrified."

"There’s nothing to be scared of," she says, "because there’s nothing we can do."

They quiz each other on mismatched memories until they are both in tears, and then they watch the video. The video from the wedding, when Bea married Paul. When Paul married Bea. When the people onscreen (and the people watching the screen) went from being man and woman to husband and wife.

"I thought there were stars," the red-haired woman says. "When you proposed."

"I remember stars," he agrees. Every few minutes he holds very still and tries not to panic because he can’t breathe. The things inside him occasionally press up against something under his ribs (his diaphragm, though he can’t remember the word) and his lungs stop working correctly. They don’t have to work much longer, though.

It’s nearly dark. The light will be back for them soon.

"I love you, honeybee," he says to the red-haired woman. She smiles, and makes a buzzing sound, and presses two fingers to his lips. They mirror the people on the television screen. He doesn’t know what it means. Not what it means to him, not what it means to her. Not what the words mean. He suspects she doesn’t, either. But somewhere in the sea of voices she is calling to him, and when the light comes they will fall into velvet blackness together.


End file.
